The High Cost of Clean Data

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With several studies over the past three yearsshowing that chief information officers regardbusiness intelligence as their top priority, youmight expect a stronger CFO-CIO relationship tobe close at hand. But a recent Accenture surveyfound that CIOs regard funding limits as one ofthe top obstacles to pursuing ambitious information-management projects. The goal of informationmanagement is to provide more workers withaccess to higher-quality data that is more secureand better governed, and can help power the nascentmove toward analytics (the linking of variousmetrics to drive business performance).

Seventy-five percent of the 160 CIOs inNorth America and Europe who were surveyedsaid they aim to develop an overall information-managementstrategy in the next three years,versus 25 percent focused on such a strategytoday. But the CIOs ranked a lack of funding,along with poor data quality, as the top barriersto their plans.

The two hurdles are closely related."Across any industry, the number of peopleneeded to transform, aggregate, and cleansedata is much higher than companies realize,"says Greg Todd, senior executive with Accenture'sInformation Management Services group. Furthercomplicating the equation is that, while thecost of the ERP systems that provide much of thedata that business intelligence and analyticsefforts need is high, atleast it's quantifiable.These newer information-managementefforts are, accordingto Forrester Researchanalyst Boris Evelson,multilayered and farfrom commoditized."It's an art, not a science,"he says. Worse,perhaps, from a CFO'spoint of view is hiswarning that informationmanagement "isnot a finite project."Todd says attacking itpiecemeal drives upthe cost.